Did Real ID help derail immigration bill?

In the aftermath of the omnibus immigration bill's demise, some commentators …

The big political news in the US this week is that the omnibus immigration bill—the one that would have created a guest worker program, opened up a legal path to citizenship for currently-illegal immigrants, and enhanced border enforcement—died. While cries of "Amnesty!" certainly helped to derail the legislation, some commentators believe that the controversial Real ID Act also played a role in its demise.

Tucked into the omnibus bill was a provision that would have required all employers to use a Real ID-compliant card to verify all workers before hiring. This provision proved controversial, and an amendment (the Tester-Baucus amendment) was introduced that would have stripped it from the bill. During debate on the amendment this week, senators that supported the Real ID provision were unable to muster the votes needed to kill off the amendment. The next day, the omnibus bill died.

Senators Baucus and Tester were quick to take credit for bringing down the bill, saying that they "brought the debate over immigration reform to a grinding halt today on the Senate floor. After opponents of Baucus and Tester’s amendment to strike Real ID requirements failed to muster a majority of votes, debate on the controversial immigration bill came to a standstill."

Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute examined the issue yesterday and concluded that "the inclusion of Real ID killed immigration reform." Though he admitted in an e-mail to Ars that this was perhaps putting the case too strongly, he did maintain that Real ID issues did help to bring the bill down. "A majority of Senators do not support REAL ID and they will not act to prop it up," he wrote, "even at the cost of bringing down immigration reform. That validates my statement—in two congressional testimonies now—that REAL ID is a dead letter. All that's left is for Congress to declare it so."

"The Real ID requirement was a poison pill that derailed this bill, and any future legislation should be written knowing the American people won’t swallow it," said Tim Sparapani, senior counsel for the ACLU, which dislikes Real ID. "Yesterday’s amendment was the first real vote in Congress on Real ID, and members of the Senate stood with the people of their states and rejected Real ID."

The death of the immigration bill does nothing to halt the full implementation of Real ID, but the law has run into increasing opposition from the states. Many states consider it an unfunded mandate that also creates new privacy concerns, and several states have simply refused to implement the directive. The most recent entry on that list is New Hampshire, which has just decided not to comply with Real ID in its current form.